Kalte Sterne: Early Recordings

Newly reissued 1981 release from these industrial pioneers compiles their earliest work, painting a picture of a band whose goal was to wring as much dread and catastrophe out of as limited a sound palette as possible.

Most Americans seem to be under the impression that German is a very violent, harsh language, and that Germans are constantly yelling and ordering each other around. Granted, the language's emphasis on pronouncing consonants distinctly from one another makes it somewhat less fluid than, say, Italian or Portuguese, but in everyday conversation, spoken German usually sounds quite lyrical, with a distinctive cadence and bounce. I have a feeling that our stereotypes of Germany and its inhabitants are basically holdovers from the 1940s, when our nations were at war with each other and it was propagandistically advantageous to make our enemies appear as raving robot madmen.

It seems there should be more than enough distance between us and World War II to have changed this perception by now, but let's face it: Americans by and large don't know shit about things outside their borders, and most of them don't care if their perceptions are wrong. And I suppose people like Blixa Bargeld aren't really helping things, either. Bargeld, as the mastermind behind German industrial provocateurs Einstürzende Neubauten, has realized every ounce of the language's potential for confrontational harshness over the last 2\xBD decades, though in fairness, he makes English sound just as frightening on the rare occasions when he chooses it over his native tongue.

In the band's earliest phases, he never bothered to throw any bones to the English-speaking audiences in the world's largest music markets (why should he, really?), just as he never bothered to appease anyone who clung to notions like the one that songs should be accessible things, with snappy melodies and friendly beats that you could groove to. The band's early albums are breathtaking clinics in well-sculpted noise; abrasive, but not so extreme as to be unlistenable or inaccessible to an adventurous rock audience. Records like Kollaps and Halber Mensch may be uncompromising, but the band's early singles actually go them one better in terms of sheer brutal abstraction.

Compiled by Bargeld on the new Mute compilation Kalte Sterne, these 13 tracks, most of which predate Neubauten's 1981 debut Kollaps, paint a picture of a band whose goal was to wring as much dread and catastrophe out of as limited a sound palette as possible. Some tracks, like closer "Durstiges Tier", consist of little more than skeletal gurgles of indeterminate origin, with Bargeld's whispered brain scrapings weaving in and out. Alexander Hacke is credited with "amplified bowed wire" on the track, and the thin, nasal sound he produces becomes the song's hideous, scoliated backbone. "13 Loecher (Leben Ist Illegal)" notoriously uses an electric drill as an instrument-- as literally "industrial" as music can get.

The first five songs feature the duo of Bargeld and percussionist/power toolist Andrew Chudy as they made their first steps into the void in 1980. Here, Chudy's vaguely tribal drums provide a rhythmic drive for Bargeld's guitar string noise, tortured whispers and creepy-as-shit Korg synthesizer drones. The greatest achievement of the band's first incarnation is probably "Tagesschau-Dub", a hypnotic, electronically assaulted percussion drone (it's hard to make percussion drone, but they manage it) piled high with incongruous samples from TV and radio. It's an astute collage and one of several tracks that betrays the band's initial interest in dub production techniques.

As new members climbed on board over the course of 1981, Neubauten largely left that approach behind, instead focusing on creating dense, martial barrages of noise full of sounds culled from beating sheets of metal, breaking glass and playing guitars as though they were washboards. Watch out with the headphones-- there are bursts of piercing white noise (most springing somehow from Bargeld's poor guitar) that can throw your equilibrium totally out of whack, not to mention leave a ringing in your ear for hours. And they have other ways to make you squirm: I haven't counted the number of times guest freak Lydia Lunch yells, "Stick it/ Stick it/ Stick it full of holes," over the 9-minute course of "Thirsty Animal", but it's more than enough to make me uncomfortable.

For anyone newcomers looking to acquire a taste for Bargeld's shop of horrors, Neubauten's Halber Mensch is a much better port of entry, but on its own merits, Kalte Sterne is a treasure trove of prime artifacts from the infancy of an important and groundbreaking band.